


the land that never melts

by shcherbatskayas



Series: delaney's great mp100 au [2]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Angst?, Arctic Misadventures, Character Study, Drowning, F/M, Gen, Hypothermia, I'm not projecting what are you on about, MP100 AU, Middle School Crushes, Mutual Pining, Near Death Experiences, Requires literally no knowledge of MP100, Teleportation, shcherbatskayas content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 09:39:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13245528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: She should be scared. She should want to go back home as soon as possible. Peko knows this.But she’s not scared. She’s not scared, and she doesn’t want to go back home as soon as possible. She doesn’t even want to go back home at all.





	the land that never melts

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact, i wrote almost all of this at one in the morning because i was having too many Anxieties to sleep. this is part of my mp100 au that i might never fully write, but the only thing you need to know about mp100 is that they all of psychic powers and fuyuhiko and peko don't have their tool bullshittery here. they do have all sorts of other fun, though. (also fuyuhiko is this au's teruki hanazawa because he's so teru sometimes i s2g.) ANYWAYS, i hope you enjoy and let me know what you think ^^

It happens suddenly, teleportation. Suddenly and with very few warning signs beforehand. Peko is young and still doesn’t have good control over it—doesn’t have good control over much of her powers, really—but she makes notes on when it happens and what she was thinking about at the time and hopes that she’ll be able to use that to help her in the future.

This time, when it happens, she is without her notebook: she left it in her bookbag, which she left in her room because she didn’t need her bookbag for walking to the grocery store. She’s fourteen now, and she’s very much capable of walking to the store and picking up milk and rice and fish and everything else her mother needed without having some sort of psychic incident on the way there. Except for right now, it seems. 

Her mother. Need. Psychic incidents. That’s how she got in this situation in the first place, thinking about that, and now she’s stuck shivering between snow-covered mountains that she doesn’t recognize. The days before her parent’s court dates were always stressful, always made her anxious in her own way, and she had just been walking to the store and thinking about the impending blowups on both sides and how she would be dragged into dealing with both of them even if she was internally kicking and screaming and about how it never ended, this merry-go-round of pretending to want custody of her to get back at each other, it never ended, never ended, never ended and then suddenly, there was a flash of red light ( _her_ red light) and she was here. 

She should be scared. She should want to go back home as soon as possible. Peko knows this. 

But she’s not scared. She’s not scared, and she doesn’t want to go back home as soon as possible. She doesn’t even want to go back home at all. 

It’s cold here. It’s only October, but it’s colder here than it is back home in the dead of winter. She only brought a light jacket with her, only quickly threw it over her school uniform (thank god that the uniform came with tights, she thinks), and she regrets that she didn’t grab a scarf or a pair of gloves. She’s standing in a valley between mountains, massive slate-gray things streaked with snow, and she stands and watches as streams collide and collapse into each other to form a river. It roars and rolls around her, vivid and vicious and victoriously alive despite this weather, and Peko wants to take off her sneakers and walk in it. They remind her of veins that she saw in her anatomy textbook, these streams and this river, and they’re going to collapse into some great, unseen artery. 

Peko wants to see where that arterty is. 

She zips up her jacket, pulls the hood over her face, and walks along the river in a direction she vaguely recognizes as north. In this weather, she knows that she should be running south, but she can’t force her feet that way. She is free here, free in a way she never is back home, free from obligations or anyone’s eyes, so she can follow her instincts. She can go north if she wants to. 

Fog passes through the valley on a train to nowhere in particular. It lingers over the river that shines blue-green and reflects her own face back up at her. She looks pale. Thin. More waifish than she ought to. She never ate enough when she was anxious, a bad habit that no one ever scolded her for. She looks like she could blend in with the snow now. Peko thinks that she wouldn’t mind that. 

As she walks, the mountains get taller. Wider. More intimidating. They jut into the sky like they’re intending to make a dent in it. She pulls out her phone, a cheap little thing that had been a birthday gift from her father that came two months after her mother sent a passive-aggressive little email about Peko’s lack of thirteenth birthday gifts. No service here—not like she was looking for it—but the camera still works. It’s dark, but the flash should make what she wants to see come through. She snaps a picture of the mountains, and then another one of the river. Fuyuhiko would appreciate the photos. 

Fuyuhiko. Right. He’d probably miss her if she disappeared into some unknown arctic landscape. Natsumi would, too, and so would the Literature Club. She should find a way home at some point, but not yet. It’s been a little less than an hour by her estimation, so no need to worry about heading back now. Her mother probably hasn’t even noticed that Peko should’ve been back twenty minutes ago, so there’s no rush on that front, and nobody else is expecting her until morning. That’s when Fuyuhiko will wonder where she is, because they’ve been walking to school together since May and she always texts him if she’s going to miss school. 

But morning is also when the court date is, and Peko would like to keep hiding here until that comes and goes. 

It’s comforting to be able to hide in so much openness. 

She keeps walking. Piles of stones start appearing, each almost as tall as she is. They dot the land in patternless clusters, looking like they were hurled down from the sky by a god that lived way up high as part of some sort of divine temper tantrum. Now that the anger had passed, the rocks are what’s left. They looked awkward and out of place and oddly majestic, and Peko can’t help but touch one as she passes by them again and again. They’re freezing, of course, but she pockets a few of the more interesting stones and plans to give some of them away later. 

Time passes, but the sky does not move. It was late afternoon when she left the house, but it’s all darkness here. She determines that she must be in the Arctic, then, if there’s this much darkness at five o’clock, and tries to envision a map of all the countries that far north so that she can try to place herself. 

“Canada.” She says out loud, just to see her breath make a fog of its own. It’s nice to see the fog, so she keeps listing them, each name falling in line with a step forwards. “The United States. Greenland. Finland. Iceland. Norway. Sweden. Russia.”

Eight countries, then. She could be in any one of eight countries, none of them being her home. Peko’s never left the country. She’s barely even left Kobe. She doesn’t know if this counts as legitimate international travel, but it feels like it does, and Peko wants to know what country is the first one she’s seen besides her own. 

A sign in the distance. Peko approaches it, making her aura flare so that she can actually read the words in front of her.

It’s in English, and Peko isn’t exactly fluent, but she knows enough to know that she’s in a national park somewhere. She reads further down the sign and recognizes a few words, recognizes _island_ and _Canada _and _Arctic Circle_ and _polar bears_ and _ocean_. She pieces them together into an approximate location and takes a picture of the sign so that she can look it up when she gets home. __

__Home._ _

__She should probably be more worried about getting back there._ _

__But the sign said _ocean_ and Peko’s never seen the sea, so she keeps walking. _ _

__One hour turns into two. The arctic air is merciless and it pierces her lungs, but it burns in a way that makes every other bit of pain fade. It forces her mind to clear, and when the wind blows, she can do nothing but shiver. She’ll catch a cold out here, can feel herself catching one, but she doesn’t worry about that as much as she ought to. What she worries about instead is ocean water, and so she keeps going._ _

__Two hours turns to three. The snow sinks her up to her ankles and goes even deeper than that if she could put more pressure down. Peko wonders what would happen if she laid down in the snow and took a nap. She’s starting to feel tired and her skin has always been cold to the touch, but now her fingers feel all but frozen. She keeps her aura bright and flaring to avoid tripping over anything that might cross into her path and she knows that she should find a way home soon and she swears that she’ll do it. She’ll do it the second she spots ocean water._ _

__And then she spots it, bright blue between giant patches of ice off the coast. It’s beautiful and still, still like Peko usually is, still like Peko wants the world to be. She wants to touch it, wants to feel it beneath her fingers, and the ice around it is solid. The ice won’t crack. Peko knows that she’s being stupid, walking over ice to touch freezing ocean water, but she wants to be a little stupid. She’s so rarely given the chance to, and there are no repercussions here, so she might as well._ _

__The first step is fine. No cracking. The second, third, and fourth are just as stable._ _

__The fifth is the killer._ _

__The ice cracks and Peko feels her feet go out from under her and before she can get her hands out of her pockets and onto something solid, her whole body slips into the sea. The water is cold, too cold, and it’s getting in her nose and her ears and her lungs now there’s panic because she has stones in her pockets and has never gone swimming anywhere but the local swimming pool and she hasn’t been there in months. There’s panic and stress and she’s trying to think of what she can do with her powers to get her out of this, but she can’t think because she can’t breathe and it’s all starting to go black and—_ _

__And then a flash of red light ( _her_ red light), and she’s standing outside the Kuzuryuu house. _ _

__It was always sudden, teleportation, and sometimes it left her with a vague feeling of car sickness. It’s much stronger this time, probably because she’s traveled across the Pacific and back in three hours and nearly drowned in the meantime, and Peko feels like she could puke. She doesn’t do that, but she does cough up seawater into the grass with a violent energy she forgot that she was capable of._ _

__She fumbles around in her pockets for her phone and eventually finds it. A quick zap of power and it’s functioning again, working just as well as it did before it took a plunge into the ocean. There’s no text messages or missed calls from her mother, and that almost makes Peko want to throw herself back into the Arctic Ocean. She doesn’t, though, if only because she doesn’t know her way back there and she is freezing, she is shivering, her cheeks are somewhat warm but the rest of her is cold and she doesn’t want to get any colder._ _

__It takes twice as long as it should to find Fuyuhiko’s contact in her phone. Normally, Peko texts, but she doesn’t trust her fingers to stay stable for that long, so she calls._ _

__He answers within a second. “Hey, what’s up?”_ _

__“A lot.” Peko’s voice shakes when she shivers and she can’t quite take a deep breath, and she’s just awake enough to be embarrassed by it. “I had an incident with teleportation, and I was wondering if you had a towel? It’s a long story, but I ended up in the Arctic and--”_ _

__“Where are you now?” Fuyuhiko cuts her off immediately, not needing any details other than that she’s in some sort of trouble and needs his help, even if the only help he can provide is a towel. Peko tries to spot which of the myriads of windows in the mansion belongs to him, but it’s a fruitless mission. There are just too many of them, and they all start to blur together if she looks at them for too long._ _

__“I’m outside your house. This is where I teleported back to after I almost drowned.”_ _

__“You almost drowned?!” Peko holds the phone away from her ears, his horrified voice coming out as staticy and grating through the phone. “Oh my god. Okay. I’ll be down in a second.”_ _

__From inside, Peko can hear him running, and Fuyuhiko flings the door open. He’s making a pile of towels float behind him and before Peko can say anything, he grabs one and almost throws it at her. Peko starts drying herself off, trying to find the right words to thank him, but her teeth keep clattering together and it’s somewhat painful, so she gives up on it for now._ _

__“Okay, so what the hell happened?” Fuyuhiko asks, stepping back and gesturing for her to come inside._ _

__Peko looks down at the marble and forces words to come out of her mouth. “I’ll get water on the floor.”_ _

__“I literally don’t care about the floor, Peko.”_ _

__Peko shrugs and decides it might be best to step inside for now, so she does. “I ended up accidentally teleporting to Canada when I was on my way to the store.”_ _

__“That’s...impressive. Horrifying, but impressive.” Fuyuhiko notes, handing her another towel._ _

__“That’s what I specialize in.” It seems like a banal, ordinary statement to Peko (it _is_ her speciality, after all, the horrifying and supposedly impressive), but it makes Fuyuhiko laugh. She gets the distinct impression that he’s laughing with her and not at her, though, so she doesn’t mind. His laugh sounds nice in her ears, warm and comforting, and Peko blames the thought on the fact that her brain has probably frozen over, but she thinks about how his laugh would change if she did something really funny like kiss him right on the lips. _ _

__“Okay, so you teleported to Canada, and then…?”_ _

__“I walked around for a bit in this national park—I took some pictures, but they might not be good because it was dark—and then I ended up falling into the Arctic Ocean. I almost drowned, but then there was a flash of light and I ended up here.” Peko’s still shivering, but she’s no longer dripping water from anywhere but her hair, so that’s something. Still, her clothes are damp and she sneezes once, and then twice, and then three times in a row._ _

__“Aw, hell.” Fuyuhiko swears and lightly takes her wrist before leading her up the stairs. “Come on, my floor has a metric shitton of blankets and Nat will lend you some of her pajamas and, I don’t know, we should probably call your parents and let them know that you’re not dead.”_ _

__Peko’s face drops for half a second and she sighs, trying to focus on how weird it is that Fuyuhiko’s house has a designated floor for him because that’s how weird his family is as opposed to her own weird family drama. “We should.”_ _

__Fuyuhiko looks confused, but then it clicks. “Right. They have some court bullshit coming up tomorrow, right? Have you been okay with that?”_ _

__She can’t make herself say the word _no_ , but she shakes her head to let him know that she isn’t. _ _

__“I figured, you seemed sort of out of it earlier.” He shrugs, and Peko spends the rest of her remaining energy on not tripping over any of the stairs. Her legs feel distantly like jelly and she almost trips over her own feet a few times, but she manages to get up to a room that she recognizes as Fuyuhiko’s living room._ _

__“Nat!” He calls up the next flight of stairs. “Nat, come down here!”_ _

From the next floor, Natsumi. “Why the hell should I?!”

__“Because Peko’s here and she probably has hypothermia!”_ _

__“Oh shit, really?” And then there’s the sound of footsteps and a familiar face. Natsumi looks Peko over, looks at her dripping hair and shaking shoulders and sighs. “What the hell happened to you?”_ _

__“Teleportation accident.” She says, not having the energy to go into more detail. “I ended up in the ocean. In the Arctic Circle.”_ _

__Natsumi lets out a low whistle and shakes her head. “Wow. You need, like, some dry clothes. I’ll grab you some. Fuyuhiko, get some blankets. Actually, get all of the blankets.”_ _

__“Already on it.”_ _

__Natsumi heads back up the stairs and Fuyuhiko actually runs to his room and emerges with three blankets. He then grabs more from a chest in the corner and Peko puts one of them around her shoulders. It’s soft, soft in a way that so few things are, and she wraps it tightly around her and stands awkwardly in the middle of the room because she doesn’t want to sit down on the couch when her clothes are still damp. She should drop the blanket then, too, but she can’t make herself do that when she’s so cold and it’s so, so warm._ _

__“Your hair is still soaked.” Fuyuhiko says, and he reaches out as if to take out one of the braids, but stops halfway through. Peko leans down a centimeter or so to let him get one of them, and she starts working on the other with trembling, clumsy fingers. They work to undo the braids together and Fuyuhiko takes the ribbons and puts them on the coffee table. Then the whole world is creme colored and soft because a towel from the floating pile has been thrown over her head and she’s aware of Fuyuhiko moving it back and forth to dry off her hair. When the towel parts, she can see Fuyuhiko’s face is much closer than usual and she can count the freckles that dot it from this distance. Her hair is static-y and bits of her glasses are fogged up and she must look more ghost than human, but he’s looking at her like she’s somehow very charming and incredible, and Peko doesn’t know what to do when she’s being stared at like that, but it isn’t unpleasant._ _

__Natsumi comes back down the stairs holding a fluffy pair of pajamas and Peko is pretty sure she’s raising her eyebrows at them. “I’ve got your fluff!”_ _

__Peko approaches her, towel still on her hair, and she takes the pajamas from her hands. “Thank you.”_ _

__“No problem, nerd. Now get changed! Bathroom’s down the hall on your left.” Natsumi ushers her off, and Peko’s quick to get changed. The pajama pants are a few centimeters too short, but they’re warm and so she doesn’t mind. She pulls the stones out of her pockets along with her phone and when she emerges, Natsumi’s holding a mug of instant hot chocolate. “I’ll trade you. Fuyu made the hot chocolate so it probably sucks, but I guarantee that it’s warm. He did that pyrotechnic thing he’s been trying out and nearly set it on fire, so, you know.”_ _

__Natsumi shrugs and Peko hands her the clothes, but she keeps the stones balled up in one of her fists and makes her phone float behind her. She takes the mug and brings it close to her face. The steam rises and it’s piping hot, too hot to drink but the perfect temperature to hold._ _

__“At least he actually didn’t set it on fire this time.” Peko says, and Natsumi laughs at that. Peko tries to laugh as well, but her voice doesn’t feel quite right when she does it. She’s still too cold to laugh properly, and she still hasn’t figured out how to do it when it’s warm, anyhow._ _

__“I’ll throw these in the dryer. You go take a nap or something.” And as if she was never there, Natsumi disappears down the hall again and up the stairs. Peko stands there by herself for a few seconds before returning to the living room, where Fuyuhiko is sitting on the couch and frowning at another mug, supposedly to try and make another cup of hot chocolate._ _

__“Feel any better?” He asks, looking away from the mug when he hears her approach._ _

__“A little bit.” Peko admits. “Do you mind if I use one of the blankets?”_ _

__Fuyuhiko nods almost too enthusiastically. “Use all of them. They’re for you.”_ _

__She sits down next to him, puts the stones and her phone down on the table, and then starts wrapping herself up in blankets. She leaves two for Fuyuhiko, just in case he somehow gets cold by being near her, and Peko sighs. Exhaustion washes over her like a wave and she can barely keep her eyes open anymore. Maybe she should try and stay awake though, just to be a good guest._ _

__“I was in a national park.” She announces. Peko thinks she might have said that earlier, but she doesn't know for sure. “I took some pictures, if you want to see them.”_ _

__“Yeah, sure. Sounds cool.”_ _

__Peko grabs her phone and shows him the mountains, the river, points to the stones and tells him to take whichever ones he thinks look interesting. She starts to drift off and her words stop making much sense to her, but Fuyuhiko doesn’t seem bothered by it. She starts to look up the park she was in, but then she remembers that she should call her mom, and Peko can’t help but make a face when it crosses her mind._ _

__“I should probably call my mom soon.” She says, letting out a sigh and pulling the blankets closer around her. “I’d rather not, though.”_ _

__“You can call her when you wake up. You should get some sleep, though. You seem tired.”_ _

__“I am tired.” Peko confirms, like that was news to anyone. But because she at least wants to learn something before she passes out, she keeps reading an article she found when she looked up the sign._ _

__She learns that she was in Auyuittuq National Park on a place called Baffin Island, and that Auyuittuq translates into Japanese as “the land that never melts.” But Peko feels her eyes begin to close against her will and she thinks her head might be on Fuyuhiko’s shoulder and she knows that there’s something is melting in her, something that had been melting for quite some time, maybe, and it’s something that she doesn’t think she needs to worry about keeping frozen any longer._ _


End file.
